Guest Commentary: Fear of merit pay

If you attend school board meetings long enough, eventually the bureaucracy inadvertently exposes its progressive socialist leanings.

At the last school board meeting, merit-based pay raises became a topic of discussion. Ramona Unified School District’s standard procedure is to give management the same percentage raise obtained by teachers through the teachers’ union bargaining process.

Two board members suggested that managers should not get automatic raises and that those raises should not necessarily all be the same. One board member argued that raises based upon merit would allow exceptional managers to receive a bigger raise than one who is performing at a merely satisfactory level. This makes sense to most people in private business, but it became apparent that it is a disturbing concept for some who work in the bureaucracy.

The arguments against merit raises for managers were weak. First, the two board members were told that giving all managers the same raise that teachers get is “the way the other districts do it.” In a union controlled board, this would be argument enough to end the discussion. Fortunately, RUSD does not have a union controlled board — yet. The two skeptical board member were not impressed with the depth of this argument, so they were given a more insidious one. The two board members were told that giving raises to managers based upon merit could be disruptive to the RUSD work environment.

The argument against merit pay went like this: 1) if managers were given raises based upon merit, they might work harder to get the employees they supervise to work harder in order to earn a better raise for themselves; 2) if managers “pressure” teachers to work harder, the teachers might think that these managers are only trying to make the bureaucracy more efficient to obtain better raises for themselves; 3) increased efficiency efforts by managers could be resented by teachers and could be disruptive to the workplace, so therefore; 4) managers shouldn’t be given merit based raises that might encourage behaviors that could disrupt the work place.

I suspect this argument seems foolish to those who work in a real business that requires meaningful productivity and efficiency to survive. However, these traits are not required for the success of a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy compromises productivity with politically correct busywork and appears to value enthusiasm more than efficiency.

An employee who knocks things out of balance by doing noticeably more work than others or who is noticeably more efficient than others is a threat to the stability of the bureaucratic work place. Offering such a person more compensation than others in such a workforce can be seen by selfish and lazy employees as unfair, threatening, and therefore, disruptive. Union shops typically protect selfish and lazy employees.

Another consequence of merit-based pay raises is that managers and supervisors would actually have to supervise their subordinates. They would have to judge their subordinates’ work performance and make distinctions between worker behaviors based upon performance standards. This judging of work behaviors goes against a core progressive principle of preferring equal outcomes over equal opportunity. If it is institutionalized that everyone gets the same pay no matter what performance is given, managers/supervisors can slack on evaluations and employees can slack on performance since pay is not connected to either of them. This progressive equal outcome principle is an incentive destroyer and breeds mediocrity.

Unfortunately, one board member who usually sides with the two who had the courage to question the standard operating procedures of the district went along with the pro-union argument of equal raises regardless of performance. The bureaucracy prevailed and the automatic-same-raise-for-all was approved.

This is an example of how government school bureaucracies became inefficient and why they will stay that way. It is why school teachers can continue to make good salaries and get decent raises without being held accountable for the declining academic performance of the students in their care. It is one of the reasons why parents should get their children as far away from the government school system as possible.

There are better educational opportunities out there that have not been tainted by progressive socialist work theory and productivity-numbing employee unions.